hours to write a profile?! google advice? just write. about yourself. It's not a difficult task. If your personality is terrible in the first place though than you have other issues that need to be resolved first, you aren't going to fool any girl for very long with the help of google and ..2+2. You need interesting hobbies and shiny new shoes and ****. This is why I don't get people cutting and pasting things they read here. That's not you. So when you're in an actual convo with the girl or meeting her for the first time you aren't congruent with your profile or hilariously hijacked opening message.

Hours to write a simple profile.*

Who said anything about not being myself or being truthful about myself? I could easily write a profile that represents myself and is boring and a little creepy and doesn't do anything to attract a woman. Actually that's what I did. But online dating (and dating generally) has a lot of salesmanship and presentation to it. I can also write a profile that is interesting and might tend to attract women, and also accurately represent myself.

edit: a few hours to write, get feedback on, and revise a profile that turns out to be excellent? Yeah, that's probably about right.

Erkel,

You're missing the point entirely, and mjkidd is right.

If I asked you to write your professional resume, would you do it in one draft, without corrections or reflection? I hope not. Something which is meant to convey an introduction should be scrutinized and analyzed and tweaked for maximum positive outcome. And nobody is suggesting that he misrepresent himself, rather that he do so as effectively as possible. Why you have a hard time understanding that and think he should just go with the first spew that comes to mind, unedited, I have no idea.

I've had mixed experiences with online dating.

I met a few girls that were legitimately psycho (like should be in an institution). This one girl showed up at starbucks for our date dressed entirely in green. She insisted on sitting in the corner in the back room. Whenever she thought I was getting too loud, she told me to be quiet or people would overhear us. However, there was nobody else in the room besides us. She kept twitching and nervously glancing around. After about 20 minutes, she randomly called me a jackass. At that point, I just got up and left without saying anything. She chased me outside and begged me to come back. I quickly flagged a cab and left.

I also ran into a ton of fat girls that tried to disguise their fatness. I would estimate half the girls I met were severely overweight, although I never would have guessed it from their profiles (always "average" or even "fit") or pictures. Your mileage may vary here -- I'm from the midwest.

I actually got really drunk with this one fat chick and ended up trying to sleep with her. Ended up being the fattest girl I ever had sex with. She had huge boobs which were pretty cool. But she also had a huge bulging gelatinous stomach which was pretty disgusting. We started off with me being on top which wasn't too bad, but she insisted on being on top because it's the only way she can finish. I was skeptical since she outweighed me (5'3 200 vs 6'0 175), but she hopped aboard and started grinding away. It hurt like hell. I thought she was going to break my pelvis. Also staring at her blubber bouncing all over was making me ill. I tried closing my eyes and picturing other girls but I simply could not maintain an erection. I blamed the alcohol, and eventually she gave up and got off. She blew me and although I was pretty disgusted at this point, she got me off pretty quickly (the stereotype was true in this case). I was a little afraid she was going to expect me to go down on her at this point (no ****ing way), but luckily i was able to get her off just by fingering her. I didn't call her back, she was pissed. Oddly enough, we were actually pretty compatible and we started talking a month or so later, and we're still friends today (like 4 years later). We never talked about that night again however.

Besides that, my main complaint is that it seems like any normal average-looking girl on there has so many options that she tends to flake out a lot and just not take trying to date you nearly as seriously as you take trying to date her. Can get frustrating

I should say that I did have some good experiences as well, including my current girlfriend of 3+ years. I've never felt like there was much of a stigma attached, at least not in a big city. It's probably the second most common way couples meet after college.

So that's my 2 cents. I'm just a little skeptical of the guys on here who are like: "well, I met 27 girls online in 6 months. 26 of them were legit 8's or better. I had sex with 24 of them on the first date, and the other 2 on the second date. The 27th was ten pounds overweight so I didn't have sex with her, although like the other 26, she wanted to have sex almost immediately after meeting me"

People regularly put in hours putting together their resume and I would say this is probably the social equivalent. Just like when applying for a job you need to stand out, and in a similar bent, I would believe that having a profile that attracts interest takes more than just writing three paragraphs quickly on a page.

Dude get a little less moral, one time. ONE TIME.

I know and understand where you're all coming from. But I also think you take yourselves way too seriously. Writing your profile for a dating site in the same vain as a professional resume is hilarious. I can picture you all crowding around a laptop in the boardroom arguing over how much space needs to be allocated in order to show that you're 'fun'.

This comment is probably more awesome than you realize.

Please don't make a profile that is bland and boring. This is the worst thing that you can do. For you socially inept people on here, who grind away 24/7 and haven't talked to a girl since when you thought they had cooties, I'm going to help you out.

First off, the profile. This is the first thing that a girl will see when you message her, (or if she messages you first!) Girls and guys are different. Guys see a girl, and depending on her look does he decide if she is attractive or not. Where as girls and base how attracted she is to the guy depending on his personality. Yes, there are rare cases where girls base guys on their looks and guys base girls on their personalities, but I'm generalizing here.

So how do you get a girls attention? Well, how do you get a girls attention at a bar? Do you sit there and talk in 1-2 word phrases like, "I like to hike." "My name is Joe." "I play poker." This is BORING! She will get tired of talking to you, think you are socially ******ed and move on to the next guy. So how do you fix this?

You can be witty about your comments, you WANT her to think "WHO IS THIS GUY?" You want to get in her head, if you get in her head, your IN.

A majority of guys profiles look like:

- I'm 6'2
- I like sports
- I work out a lot
- I like to relax with my friends

This is stupid and boring. You think she's going to be like, "oh he's athletic"? But guess what? Have you ever read a girls profile that says that she loves the outdoors then see a picture of her and she's 300 pounds? Yeah, girls will assume the same thing!

So this is how I would write the details of my profile:

"A lot of guys on these dating sites like to talk about their physique (6'2, 180 lbs deep blue eyes) but it's not that important in the end. It's all about the character. I pretend to enjoy playing football, but I'm more interested in tackling other guys HAHA!"

Guess what? I could have said "I'm 6'2, I weigh 180 lbs, and have blue eyes and I like football" But that's boring and lame. She won't know if you're serious or not and so she'll be like "WTF WHO IS HE? IS HE SERIOUS? WTF?!" Guess what? YOU'RE IN!

I havent finished reading the thread but I just ROFL hard @ this... micro limit online dating... Enjoying the thread hope it ends well and you don't have a crazy psycho stalker by now...

you're a fhag for being embarrassed to ask a girl out at panera.

it takes guts to talk to a girl in person. talking to a girl behind a keyboard takes 0 courage

So how does this match.com or pof thing work? do you just wink like 20 chicks and see how many respond?

What do you do on match.com to communicate? Did you guys pay?

Hm...it is.

You know what I mean...

OMG, so so n00b

I have nothing against online dating but still think sending "winks" is gay and emasculating. Maybe one day I will set time aside during therapy to work through this.

Sending winks is a completely bust strategy, particularly for a guy. Engage, dammit. ****ing write something.

From my understanding you cant send messages without paying.....Is everyone here paying?

I never used match.com, I used a free site.

Exactly. In addition to the reasons I referenced it's also lazy on its face - chicks are probably getting a ton of these anyway so they don't serve as a differentiator, and it could say to them "hey I'm too lazy to actually read your profile and think of a unique message, so instead I'm gonna carpet bomb match.com with winks to every halfway decent-looking cum dumpster in the hopes of getting some responses". That is, if I understand correctly how winks work.

OK, it turns out that I wasn't anywhere NEAR the bottom, because THIS girl just became the first girl to initiate contact with me.



She also became the first girl I chose not to answer. Even as low as I'm aiming, I don't think I could get it up for this one, even with the lights out. It's too bad, too, she has one of my favorite profiles ever, she's definitely very bright...if it's possible for a bright person to post a pic like that.

(Now I need to worry about this one finding this thread somehow...)

Analrapist - part analyst, part therapist.

Yea I agree with the poster who said you gotta be realistic. There's tons of 6-8s online...you will not find a 9+...maybe a 9- here and there. But like I said, you send 10 emails, get 6-7 responses, have 3-4 convos, get 2-3 numbers, get 1-2 dates. That's just how it seems to be. I have a decent profile and some good pics. But you will encounter lots of flakes and/or fake profiles. I'm not paying a dim tho, the site is free. Should have some more interesting stories after the weekend. I do notice that a girl who is "athletic' is usually average..."average" is usually chubby...and "a few extra pounds" is large. Just add a category and that's reality.

Just don't try so hard...I could care less if I get a response from a girl I don't know.

No doubt, before you write a profile search for guys your age in your area.
You will see there are about 5 profile types for guys who actually try to write...
"mr sports" - I like football and working out.
"mr career bragger" - I'm a student in blah, I work for blah.
"mr pretend funny/goofy/witty" - a whole long page of nonsense, like that guy that posted a few pages back.
"mr nice guy" - a pathetic sounding profile about how nice they are
"mr jaded" - a depressed person who is so depressed they can't see how obvious it comes through with what they wrote.

I've tried many different strategies on profiles and I really believe the best is a short profile that makes you look like "mr I have other stuff going on so I don't have all day to work on my profile".
The girl is going to look at your picture, how tall you are, what you do for a living and if you smoke or not. If you can't beat other guys that are messaging her in this area, nothing you say under is going to overcome the above. The odds are you will say something she doesn't like in the bottom part even if you got by the first part...let other guys hang themselves there while you have a conversation with her and she figures out what you could have put in the main part.

Also myspace has gone completely down hill for meeting women...Too many real life friends/family on there now...
But it probly depends on age...Facebook I would imagine is great if your under 24, much over that though and its the friend/family problem again.

anyone know if eHarmony is good for younger people? Their pitch fits my needs very well in that I don't want to look online for casual hookups like a bar scene or something, but at the same time it seems like it's aimed at people in the thirties whereas I'm in my twenties.

I'unno, take their little test so they can mysteriously reject you out of hand for not being pigeonhole-able enough.